Charging strategies for electric vehicles connected to street lighting networks

In order to reduce the impact of global warming, the European Commission has decided in the continuation of the Kyoto protocol to reduce drastically greenhouse gas emissions. In this matter, the progressive replacement of thermal vehicles by electric ones is considered as a key objective. For that purpose, several prerequisites must be considered for the rapid deployment of Electrical Vehicles (EV) in the European market. The first of these prerequisites consists in the design of a new generation of batteries with higher energy efficiency, larger capacity and improved robustness. The second one is the design and rapid deployment of cost effective charging infrastructures. At last, the emergence of European standards in all these matters is an imperious necessity for the viability of the EVs European market. This thesis is mainly focused on the second of these three prerequisites. It is widely admitted that in the short term, EVs usage will be essentially limited to urban areas before being extended to the whole territory. As it is considered by the French National TELEWATT research project to which we have contributed, street lighting networks can be used judiciously to deploy in the short term low cost charging infrastructures. The basic principle of this project consists in coupling to each street light one or two EV's charging stations if one or two parking spots are located nearby. Various electrical constraints specified in the TELEWATT project must be satisfied to enable EVs' charging without degrading the quality of the lighting system. In this thesis, we begin to demonstrate the feasibility of such an operation. For that purpose, we have developed a simulator enabling to depict the dynamic behavior of the global system. The strength and originality of this simulator resides in its capacity to determine in real-time and with the necessary precision if an EV can effectively be connected to a charging station. The response to this question depends on static and dynamic characteristics of the street lighting network and on the state of charge of the batteries of both the connected and candidate EVs. The dynamism of the charging process of each EV strongly depends on the instantaneous power consumed by the global infrastructure. The second original result of this thesis consists in the design of scheduling policies to activate the various charging stations. Our objective is to propose via these scheduling policies, various types of guaranteed Quality of Service (QoS) to the end-users. Such guarantees can be declined for instance in terms of expected state of charge for a given parking term. (author)